NAIROBI - Wangari Maathai, a 64-year-old Kenyan environmentalist, won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. She rose to international fame for campaigns against government-backed forest clearances in Kenya in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Here are some facts on the first woman from Africa to be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize.
* Wangari Maathai was born in Nyeri, central Kenya in 1940. She holds a doctorate in biological sciences, and is the head of Veterinary Anatomy Department at the University of Nairobi.
* She is the founder of the Green Belt Movement, mainly with women members, which has planted some 30 million trees around Africa in a campaign to slow deforestation and erosion.
* As well as protecting the existing environment, her strategy is to strengthen the basis for ecologically sustainable development.
* In 1992 riot police clubbed her and three other women unconscious in central Nairobi during a demonstration. She has been teargassed, threatened with death by anonymous callers, and once thrown into jail overnight for leading protests.
* Maathai went to court numerous times to block forest clearances by the former government of President Daniel arap Moi. He lost power in 2002 elections in which Maathai won a parliamentary seat for the victorious opposition.
* Maathai was made an assistant environment minister but says forest clearances continue and has threatened to quit the government.
* "It's a matter of life and death for this country," Maathai once said of clearances. "The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem."
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
